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YAM - Version 2.9
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About YAM
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YAM (Yet Another Mailer) lets you send and receive electronic mail (e-mail)
over the Internet and maintain archives of messages in your computer via a
graphical user interface. The idea came to the original author (Marcel
Beck) back in 1995 when he first tried using e-mail. The programmes
available at the time were either powerful but complicated to configure, or
else used a too limiting user interface. The goal, therefore, was to
program a cross between AdMail and AirMail, with a few ideas coming from
Pegasus Mail.
While earlier versions of YAM were developed closed source, today's
versions are developed by an independent open source community. Since the
year 2000 a group of mixed developers maintain YAM and release new versions
from time to time. While these versions are all targeted for the Amiga
platform, versions of different AmigaOS incarnations are supplied. This
includes native PowerPC ports to modern Amiga platforms like AmigaOS4 or
MorphOS.
Before you start the installation
---------------------------------
YAM 2.5+ not only uses newer configuration files, the files used to store
separate emails are named differently as well. Therefore, before you start
the installation script to overwrite your existing installation, it's
strongly recommended that you create a backup of your old YAM installation,
including all folders and configuration files. Afterwards you can install
the update into your old YAM directory if you wish. On start-up, YAM 2.5+
will automatically convert your old configuration files to the new 2.5+
format, and after being started, YAM will rename your old emails as
necessary, always under your control. It is also recommended that you
re-save your configuration as soon as possible in order to update your
.config file to the new format, which will reveal all the new options
available.
In addition, please note that since YAM 2.5 no 'YAM:' assign is required
anymore. That means, you may even install it in a new location and start it
right away from there without having to touch your old installation.
Afterwards you may manually import the mails from your old installation.
Thus, you can in principle now have to independent installation of YAM
using two completly different versions.
What's new
----------
Here's a list (in alphabetical order) of the brave developers who have
contributed to this release since the last official one:
Jens Maus
Thore Böckelmann
And here's a PARTIAL list of the changes in this version with respect to
the previous official update:
- implemented proper UTF-8 support for the whole index of a folder. This
allows now to switch charsets without having to rescan a folder index.
- implemented a completely new procedure to deal with timezone and daylight
saving times as the old method were unable to identify the daylight
saving time for past dates. Now the official timezone databases published
by iana.org are used instead. This finally corrects the time display for
old mails when DST times changes relative to the current date/time.
- The main window layout (size+position) and list sorting options will now
be automatically saved upon exiting YAM rather than forcing a user to
explicitly 'snapshot' that information via the corresponding MUI
functionality. An additional option in the configuration of YAM allow to
disable this, thought.
- Enforce disposing of all images if YAM is running on an 8 bit screen
(excluding the Workbench) as soon as the image is no longer used. This
works around a bug in picture.datatype which seems to keep a pointer to
the screen the image was remapped to and accesses it later even if the
screen no longer exists.
- fixed the partly broken support for the Mail-Reply-To (MRT) and
Mail-Followup-To (MFT) headers where YAM was not suggesting the right
reply addresses according to the documentation of the MRT/MFT feature.
- improved charset/codeset handling support when using external editors
aware of UTF-8
- fixed a problem where YAM was unable to create properly UTF-8 encoded
emails.
- when adding new filters YAM will now automatically jump to the bottom of
the filter rule list.
- To cleanup the main program directory of YAM all folder directories will
be automatically moved to a new subdirectory named "Folders" in the
user's mail directory (which defaults to YAM's program directory if not
changed via ToolTypes or the user configuration). Possibly duplicate
directory names get a unique number appended. To ease folder setup it is
not possible anymore to select any arbitrary path for a folder, but only
the directory name within the "Folders" directory.
- The write window now features a small clone of the attachment list on the
first page. A context menu allows to perform the same actions as for the
big list on the second page.
- Implemented an interactive attachment reminder feature as known from
Thunderbird. If enabled and the user types in certain keywords from a
user definable list and no attachment has been added to the mail a
reminder will be shown to inform the user that an attachment might be
desired.
- Implemented an 'Archive' folder which move mails to a folder named after
the mail's original send date. The archive folders are excluded from
deleting old mails automatically to make sure the mails are really
archived until the user explicitly deletes them.
- implemented a new functionality to allow to define different 'incoming'
and 'sent' folders per configured mail account (POP3/SMTP). This should
allow to more easily and directly filter emails not requiring to
explicitly define separate filters.
- Fixed a bug which caused YAM to use the first matching address of a mail
as user identity even if this address was the sending instead of the
receiving one.
- fixed a bug where the MAILINFO ARexx command caused a crash if the mail
in question contained no message ID.
- when opening a new window YAM will now set the title of a screen to the
same title as well. This improves recognition of the currently active
window as the screen titlebar will then automatically refer to YAM and
thus make it possible that a user identifies by looking at the screen
title bar which application is the currently active one.
- fixed a buffer overrun in the RFC 2014 decoding routines which
potentially caused unexpected crashes.
- restored the behavior of previous versions when resolving the names of
address book mailing lists. The new method added in YAM 2.8+ caused
certain problems.
- fixed the read/unread marking of mails which was not done for all columns
of the mail list.
- when checking for new mails YAM will now show "Checking mails from ..."
rather than "Mail Transfer from ..." which was not entirely correct.
- The position of the quick search bar is now configurable and allows the
user to place the bar below the main mail list.
- improved online documentation (http://doc.yam.ch/) regarding the use of
quotes when specifying file/directory paths.
- changed the "jumping to the first unread and/or most recent message when
entering a folder" functionality to be configurable on a per folder basis
instead of a being a global option only.
- The time and date information from the Date: header line will now be
converted to local time if the usual "short" headers are shown. For full
header display it will be shown as it is.
- The entered search string is now automatically cloned between the
different pages.
- The output of the external archiver command can now be redirected
optionally to a console window while the archiver is running to show the
progress.
- The single items of the list can now be activated immediately by pressing
their number on the keyboard. "0" will be mapped to the 10th attachment.
- All kinds of links (http(s), ftp, etc) will now be underlined as well.
- deleting or archiving a single mail will now behave consistently in every
situation and correctly respect the folder's current sort order.
- any rule of a configured filter can now be removed or an additional one
added in between instead of allowing only to add/delete rules to/from the
bottom of the rule list.
- The mail preselection list now shows the contents of the To: header line
to let users spot unwanted mails easier.
- Printing a mail will now include a list of attachments. Additionally the
printout will no longer contain a plain copy of all header lines, but a
stripped down version of subject sender, receiver and date.
- implemented a NOICONS switch for the REQUESTFILE Arexx command which will
open the corresponding file requester but hide and icons (#?.info files).
- The Get and Send toolbar buttons will now be disabled in case there is no
active POP3 or SMTP server available.
- fixed a problem with not seeing a folder added to the folder list
immediately.
- address book entries can now be sorted by clicking on the list titles
similar to the mail list of the main window.
- fixed the LISTFREEZE and LISTUNFREEZE arexx commands to deal correctly
with the Quiet settings of other YAM components.
- PGP encrypted mails can now be excluded from a search to let in run
unattended without the need to enter a password.
- Mails dragged out of the spam folder will now be marked as non-spam in
case the "mark on move" option is enabled.
- implemented a new "Mail Account" column in the main mail list to be able
to sort emails based on mail account/hostname a mail was received so that
users can better order their mails due to the fact that since YAM 2.8
mails are now transferred asynchronously from multiple servers.
- Searching user identities by address or ID will now correctly respect the
identity's active state and return active identities only. In case a mail
references an inactive user identity YAM will silently fall back to the
next best matching identity.
- Implemented a new option to trigger a snapshot action on all alive
windows and to save the layout/state of certain groups and objects.
- fixed a bug so that any edit operation in the quick search bar will now
abort a search operation in progress.
- fixed a problem when YAM was run for the very first time after an
installation without any valid .config file. Opening the config window
too early caused this window to be opened without any graphics from the
default theme.
- when changing a folder's path the global .folders file will be
immediately saved to make the change persistent.
- mails from the Trash folder are now excluded from the spam filter.
- mail disposal is now protected by a reference counter. This makes it
possible to move a mail to a different folder in concurrent processes
while still accessing the same mail without accessing invalid or already
freed memory. This fixes numerous different potential crash problems.
- All SPAM filter related GUI elements will now be properly disabled if the
SPAM filter is completely disabled as well.
- fixed a crash bug when using the gravatar image search functionality on a
never set address book entry.
- the online ARexx documentation (http://doc.yam.ch/) can now be directly
accessed via the corresponding main menu item.
- fixed a problem where html parts of a mail weren't forwarded to a web
browser but saved to disk instead due to not using the right file
extension.
- added a fresh and updated finnish translation/catalog to YAM.
- added a low memory handler to flush all folder indexes automatically if a
system is about to run low on memory.
- fixed a crash bug when in the write window the autosave functionality
activates while typing.
- when enabling the "detect cyrillic code sets" functionality YAM will now
warn the user in case he has setup YAM to use a non-cyrillic code set for
as the local charset.
- significantly improved performance of parsing emails with large
attachments. Now YAM will reuse the size parameter of each MIME part to
speed up memory allocations during MIME parsing.
- fixed a problem where editing a mail a second time added an additional
superfluous white space to the mail body.
If you want to have a more detailed technical information on what was
actually changed, please have a look at the included 'ChangeLog' file.
You can also consult the official YAM homepage for more information on the
changes done with YAM 2.9 (http://yam.ch/milestone/YAM%202.9)
What is still missing?
----------------------
- lots of translators! YAM 2.4 featured lots of different languages, but
due to the large amount of changed texts these catalogs are completely
outdated. Especially support for such common languages as Danish,
Finnish, etc. is currently missing. If you are a native speaker
of a language that YAM does not offer (anymore), then please contact us.
See http://yam.ch/wiki/Localization for more information.
- lots of documentation! As with the translation, the documentation largely
lags behind. Again, if you are a native speaker (even for English) and if
you are interested in updating/writing YAM's documentation then please
contact us. Now that with YAM 2.8+ we have switch to a pure online-based
documentation system people are welcome updating the online documentation
which can be found at http://docs.yam.ch/ and is based on a public wiki
engine.
Source code
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Due to lack of time and motivation, Marcel Beck stopped working on YAM back
in 2000, but the sources were released under the GNU General Public License
at SourceForge.net. If you want to help developing this program further or
perhaps you are considering a port to a different operating system, please
consider joining the YAM Open Source team instead of doing it on your own.
Our home page is at http://yam.ch/ from which you can obtain all
necessary information to contact us. We want to hear from you!
Donations
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If you like the development of YAM and you want to give our open source
developers an additional motivation to continue to update YAM in future or
if you simply want to say "Thanks", the YAM project accepts money donations
via PayPal. All the donations during a release cycle are collected and
divided by considering the activity of each developer during the time the
development lasted. This way we hope to attract more developers in future,
which in turn should give you a new version more quickly.
http://yam.ch/wiki/Donations
So in case you want to support our efforts to develop a modern up2date
e-mail client for modern AmigaOS-based systems, please consult the above
URL for more information on how to donate to us.
Online resources
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As YAM is an open source development effort, we have several online
resources cover your daily YAM needs:
http://yam.ch/ - Official Support Homepage
http://download.yam.ch/ - Direct path to the download page
http://docs.yam.ch/ - Online documentation system
http://faq.yam.ch/ - Online Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
http://bugs.yam.ch/ - Bugtracker and Feature Requests
http://forum.yam.ch/ - Web-based online forum
For Developers:
http://nightly.yam.ch/ - Access to experimental developer snapshots
http://svn.yam.ch/ - Web-based source code SVN access
http://stats.yam.ch/ - Daily updated development statistics